Busy Without A Job
It has been along time since I have posted primarily
It has been a week since I have had a post so I thought I would get in gear. I have been watching some basketball games of the local High School here. The girls team is ranked numbers in the state for 3a ball and they are undefeated they have a good club I hope they do well. Well anyways I am not going write about basketball but continue my series from the book Why Guys Need God by Mike Erre. Today I want to share a couple of quotes from chapter 10 and talk about them a little bit.
When we come out of hiding in front of each other, relationship will take hard work and lots of grace. The church gets lots of criticism because of its imperfections.
So many times we hide who we really are. Sometimes it is like we have to put on some sort of facade so people do not see the real us. I am not sure what drives this perhaps it is fear of people seeing the real us or fear that we are not good enough. Rarely do we tell people our real struggles or the things that are keeping us from being all we want to be in Christ or all we can be in Christ. The truth is if we really do be ourselves then in fact it will take alot of hard work and lots of grace. Grace to forgive others even when we really do not want to and grace to ask for forgiveness even when we do not want to. But if we continue to pretend to be someone we are not then the church is just a place where we go to be fake. The church definitley is not perfect and we are indeed a bunch of reformed sinners going thorug the process of sanctification yet many times we act like we have already been fully sanctified and that we have no problems whatsoever.
I often wonder what would church be like if people were real. What if a man walked into Sunday school and said I am struggling with pornography and I need help, or what if a woman walked in and said I struggle with gossiping I need help, or how about I have bitterness in my heart I need help. The church is supposed to be a community loving each other and holding each other accountable but I am afraid we have become a community where everything is based on only what we want people to perceive us to be and not who we really are. We don’t want people to know our secret sins what will is take for us to stop being superficial and just be honest. It is so hard. Here us the second quote.
Most churches teach men how to pretend behind religious fig leaves. We learn to act in the right religious ways, look the right religious ways, sing the right religious ways, and so on. We usually are not encouraged to actually share how things really are. So even though we need to connect with other guys at a really deep level, the church actually often hinders this process.
Prayer isn’t a place to be good; it is a place to be honest.
I already spoke about this above. I do not think this is a problem for just men either. I think often we go to church to pretend. Pretend to be someone we are not and we rarely go just to be honest and admit our struggles.
Wow these last few days have been extremely crazy for me. It all started yesterday. My wife said she was having alot more contractions and our baby is at 32 weeks in addition she said she had not felt the baby move for awhile. So I told her it was better to be safe then sorry and to call the dr. She took my advice and the dr. sent us to hospital to get it checked out. This was our 5th trip to the hospital during this pregnancy. While there the nurse ran some tests and said that her water had broke and she was admitted. We both thought that id were water had broke then our child would be born that night. Â We were obviously wrong.
So I spent the night in an uncomfortable chair and got about 3 hours of sleep before coming home showering and heading back to the hospital. When I got back to the hospital we received good news. The nurse said that another test was negative and that her water may not have broke so if she got three negatives she would be allowed to come home tonight. However, you guessed it the next two showed signs that her water may have broke. Confused? Me too. So they decided to keep her.  Not sure how long maybe until the baby is born we do not know.
So in the middle of this I received a phone call from a Pastor who had been in contact with me about the possibility of becoming their Youth Pastor. The kicker is everything with this church at the moment is matching up perfectly. Â Well other then it will be 1,000 miles from our family still. But everything else is perfect it is almost too good. New building, in a place I have always wanted to live, more of a rural setting, Is this from the Lord? God please make it known to me.
In addition to all this my mom will be here next Friday and I have so much to get done for the move. The plan is to send everything back to Missouri but my wife may still be in the Hospital? This is crazy. If you got some advice give it.
Sorry for the rambling just needed to say something.